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Just weeks after the Obama Administration scored a victory in its Clean Power Plan, the Supreme Court on Tuesday pushed back by temporarily blocking implementation of the Plan until lower court rulings are complete, which may take years.

EPA’s Clean Power Plan was issued last year as an effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from existing power plants. Natural gas, renewables, nuclear and efficiency were winners to different degrees, but coal was definitely the loser. The Plan’s goal is to cut emissions from existing power plants by a third, relative to 2005, over the next 15 years.

The Supreme Court issued a stay on the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan this week, putting in question whether America can be committed to addressing climate change. Source: SCOTUS

In the 5-to-4 vote to issue a stay on this Plan, the Supreme Court did not actually kill the Plan. The Court just stopped its implementation until after an appeals court rules on a challenge to the Plan by 27 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another federal appeals panel on January 21st rejected the challenge, so it was appealed again.

If the case makes it to the Supreme Court, Plan supporters fear that this stay by SCOTUS signals their dislike of the Plan and that they will actually kill it. Since the Supreme Court has never before granted a request to halt a regulation before it was reviewed by a federal appeals court, it looks bad for this Plan.

The problem with the Clean Power Plan is it uses the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. This was a tactical mistake since atmospheric carbon dioxide does not have a direct human health effect no matter what one thinks about climate. The Plan should have been based on the health effects of power plant emissions which the Clean Air Act is better suited to, and which would be similar to how we addressed acid rain. Coal would have been directly targeted, as was the underlying focus of the Plan anyway, and it would have been easier to defend legally.

Critics claim that the Plan is inherently unfair, punishes taxpayers and will destroy our economy, similar to what was claimed for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a host of other environmental changes that have kept our country reasonably cleaner and safer than most other nations in the world.

Fair to say none of that ever happened. And none of that will happen if this Plan gets enacted. What would happen is the United States would get much cleaner and healthier air, regardless of what you think about climate change.

Under the Clean Power Plan, emissions of sulfur dioxide from power plants would be 90% lower in 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Emissions of nitrogen oxides would be 72% lower. And air-borne coal particulates would drop dramatically. Because these pollutants create dangerous soot and smog, getting to such low levels will mean avoiding thousands of premature deaths and thousands fewer asthma attacks and hospitalizations in the future.

Since coal kills about a million people worldwide each year, more than any other part of our infrastructure, this public health aspect is the real strength of this Plan, even as climate change is used as the political driver. And the savings to our health care system alone would more than pay for it.

But this Plan will be easier to enact than anyone realizes. Half of our existing coal plants will be pretty old by 2030, it’s just a matter of planning their replacement with a combination of gas, renewables and new nuclear. This is exactly what we have been doing over the last ten years, and why our carbon emissions have fallen as much as they have (Time). The Plan only formalizes the ongoing transition from coal to gas that is occurring anyway.

Unfortunately, this ruling goes beyond our borders and may impact the fragile agreements made at the Paris COP21 climate meeting in December. This Plan was a major signal to world leaders that America was serious in the fight against climate change. If it dies in court, America will look very unserious on this issue - again.

More than that, there is no addressing climate change without strong government intervention like this Plan, so it’s death may well mark the death of any chance to take the Earth’s fate into our own hands.